But if Claudia and her neighbor remained intent on their own private quarrel, the rest of the street celebrated along with the rest of the city. People passed jars of wine back and forth. Those who still had salt meat or candied fruit stored away brought them out and shared them with friends--and sometimes with passersby, too--confident they could replace them now.
And, everywhere, people were embracing. George almost walked past a young couple in a doorway three or four doors down from his house and shop. They didn’t seem any different from scores of other happy pairs he’d seen … till he noticed that one of them was Constantine the potter’s son and the other his daughter Sophia.
He coughed. At the same time, he took off Perseus’ cap, returning to visibility. Constantine and Sophia jumped in the air, then flew apart from each other as if he’d dumped a pad of water over them.
“Father!” Sophia exclaimed. She managed to pack a multitude of meanings into the one word: joy at having him come back again, along with something that wasn’t joy at all at having him come back at that particular moment
“Uh, we didn’t see you, sir,” Constantine added.
“I know. I noticed,” George said. Constantine and Sophia both turned red. The cap of invisibility wasn’t why they hadn’t seen him. They’d been otherwise occupied. If he’d kept quiet, he might have stood there for an hour before they noticed him. “Maybe you won’t see me the next time, either,” he went on. “Maybe I’ll be more annoyed about it the next time, too. Go on home, Constantine. Sophia, you come with me.”
Constantine went, without a murmur. Only later did George realize that, with a sword on his belt and with his right arm and tunic splashed with blood obviously not his own, he looked well able to enforce any orders he might give. Even Sophia followed him without arguing.
In his own doorway, he found Theodore kissing the plump daughter--plump despite the siege--of Dalmatius the oil-seller, who lived in the next street over. He hadn’t known the two of them cared about each other (for that matter, he didn’t know whether they would care about each other tomorrow, or in an hour). An evenhanded man, he coughed as loudly as he had with Sophia and Constantine.
Theodore and his friend--her name, George remembered, was Lucretia--sprang apart, as Sophia and Constantine had done. “Hello, Father,” Theodore said sounding a little less reproachful than Sophia had.
“Hello,” George answered mildly. Lucretia headed for home without George’s suggesting it. He wondered how many more she’d kiss before she got there. Then he wondered if Theodore was wondering the same thing.
A moment later, such abstractions stopped troubling his mind, for Irene came running out of the shop and threw herself into his arms. He tilted her face up and kissed her, doing a good and thorough job of it. Sophia and Theodore both coughed. They sounded downright consumptive as each tried to outdo the other.
Irene ignored them. Her lips were urgent against her husband’s. George ignored his children, too, till he started to laugh. That ruined the kiss. “We’re married,” he growled at Sophia and Theodore, and returned to what he’d been doing when he was so rudely interrupted.
Except for his son and daughter, no one paid one more kissing couple any mind. Claudia and her next-door neighbor, by contrast, had drawn a fair-sized crowd. A quarrel in Thessalonica, just then, was remarkable for its rarity.
“Thank God you’re safe!” Irene exclaimed when her lips separated from George’s again. She dragged him into the shop. A couple of braziers made it a little warmer in there than it had been outside. If Theodore and Sophia hadn’t followed them in, George got the idea his wife might have dragged him down onto the floor of the shop, too. Before he got in there, he doubted whether he would have been able to do anything in response to that. Just when he decided he would, he found he didn’t have the chance.
“Were there really centaurs out there, Father?” Sophia asked. “People are saying so, but people are always saying all sorts of things that aren’t true, so they can make a better story out of them.”
“There really were centaurs,” George said solemnly. He could feel the truth of that on the insides of his thighs. He wasn’t used to riding a donkey, let alone a horse, let alone a supernatural being with a mind of its own--a mind, when he was aboard Crotus, full of mad, drunken fury.
“And those other things?” Irene asked. She shivered against George and crossed herself. “I didn’t want to look up in the sky, for fear I’d believe what I was seeing.”
Only Irene, George thought with a smile, would put it like that. But the smile quickly faded. “Those other things were there, too. I’m glad they’re gone.”
“God overcame them,” Irene said.
George wondered about that. The Slavic thunder god and gods of sun and moon had paled before the power of the Lord, but they hadn’t vanished. And the struggle between Triglav and St. Demetrius had barely begun before the centaurs distracted and then overwhelmed the Slavic wizards and their Avar leader, thus returning the conflict, at least as George perceived it, to the mundane plane.
“However it happened, the siege is over,” he said, “and that’s what matters.”
Nobody argued with him. “The Slavs and Avars won’t be back here any time soon, either,” Theodore said. “We taught ‘em a proper lesson, we did.” To listen to him, he’d beaten back the barbarians single-handedly during his brief stretch of duty on the wall.
“You still have that cap,” Irene said, pointing to it. By the way she spoke, it might have been Joseph’s coat of many colors soaked in blood.
“Yes, and glad of it, too,” George said. “Without it, we wouldn’t have had the centaurs in front of the city, or Father Luke with ‘em, and who knows what would have happened?
I’ve got to go up into the hills and give it back, but I want to use it one more time before I do.”
“I don’t want you to do that,” Irene said.
“Well, I’m going to,” George answered in a tone that brooked no argument. Irene stared at him. He wasn’t the sort of man who commonly ignored what his wife wanted. Maybe that was what let him get away with it
Even after midnight, revelers remained on the streets of Thessalonica. In a way, George liked that. The people of the poor, beleaguered city deserved to celebrate their victory over the Slavs and Avars. In another way, noisy roisterers on the street were a nuisance to the shoemaker. He would have preferred everything around him to be dead quiet. That would have made what he was doing more impressive.
Maybe I should have waited, he thought. What if he’s out celebrating? What do I do then? He shook his head. He couldn’t afford to wait, not if he wanted to keep the peace in his own home. At the moment, Irene wasn’t arguing with him. If Perseus’ cap stayed in his home for several days before he got around to using it, that would change. He knew his wife. She would come up with a reason why he shouldn’t use it, and likely reasons why he ought to get rid of it, too. And they would be good reasons--he was sure of it. If he turned them down, he would have a quarrel on his hands. He didn’t want that.
And so, instead of a quarrel on his hands, he had Perseus’ cap on his head. He slipped through Thessalonica’s streets unnoticed, unremarked upon. Some of the things he noticed while slipping through the streets were themselves remarkable, but he kept quiet.
The district by the citadel, up in the northeastern part of the city, was where the rich people lived. One of the privileges of being rich was taking shelter in the citadel if the city wall was breached. George went slowly; he seldom came to that part of town. From the outside, the house he was looking for wouldn’t be much different from its neighbors. And, in the darkness, the differences were next to impossible to make out.